“By the middle of the month, iPhones and iPads will likely pass a Pentagon security review that will result in their use, for the first time, on military networks,” Spencer Ackerman reports for Wired.
“As part of the Pentagon’s big push into the mobile-device market, the Defense Department has already issued so-called Security Technical Implementation Guides, or STIGs, for BlackBerry 10 phones and Playbook tablets, and for Samsung’s Android-powered Knox phone. Apple will not be left out,” Ackerman reports. “‘We expect to release the iOS STIG sometime in the next two weeks,’ says Air Force Lt. Col. Damien Pickart, a Pentagon spokesman.”
Ackerman reports, “It’s a bureaucratic irony of the mobile age: Apple desktop and laptop computers still aren’t cleared to access military networks, but iPhones and iPads will be… The Pentagon’s top information-security officials speak about purchasing a “family of devices” for military use, yet it’ll be weeks or months before any of those devices actually make their way to troops’ pockets and backpacks. Most likely, by the time the first military mobile orders get issued, Apple products will be among them.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The American company, not the beleaguered Canadian antiquity nor the South Korean convicted patent infringer, should be priority number one for U.S. government and military procurement, especially where security is a necessity. Period.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Thumper” for the heads up.]
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